


The Glass and Reed Advertising Agency

by seekingferret



Category: Henry Reed - Keith Robertson
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 16:06:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1095940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingferret/pseuds/seekingferret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Henry and Midge return for another adventure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Parhelion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Parhelion/gifts).



> Chapter 2 contains a brief photo tour of the real Grover's Corner, for your enjoyment after you finish the story.

July 8th

This is the private journal of Henry Reed. If found, please return to Henry Reed care of Mr. J. Alfred Harris, RD 1, Grover’s Corner, Princeton, N.J.

This is still a journal, not a diary, even though I have now read the diary of Mr. Samuel Pepys, so I know that diaries are not just things written by silly girls writing about the boys they have crushes on. Samuel Pepys lived a very interesting life, and he wrote about it in his diary. He met with all sorts of famous politicians and admirals and kings and he described whether he thought they were good at their jobs or not. Nonetheless, this is still my journal, because it's been my journal for too long to change now. 

Well, I am back in Grover's Corner for the fourth consecutive summer! I originally started spending my summers at my Aunt and Uncle's house in New Jersey because my parents were worried that I was not spending enough time being an ordinary American boy. My father is in the diplomatic service and I have lived all over the world. Most recently, I had been living in Manila for the past two years, but my family moved to London two months ago when my father got a new posting. I like London a lot more than I liked Manila, but I would still rather spend my summers in Grover's Corner because exciting things always happen when I'm in Grover's Corner. 

My Uncle Al, my mother's brother, who I stay with when I'm in Grover's Corner, says that exciting things never happen in Grover's Corner the rest of the year. He has a theory that somehow I cause all of the exciting things to happen by coming to visit. It is true that some of the things that happened were because of me, but I don't think his theory is fair. My friend Midge was responsible for some of the exciting things that happened while I was in town, and she lives in Grover's Corner all year long. And many of the things that happened were neither of our faults. Uncle Al just uses me as a convenient scapegoat. 

So far, not much has happened since I got here. My Aunt and Uncle picked me up at the airport and drove me back to Grover's Corner, and I spent most of the morning unpacking my clothing and catching my Aunt Mabel up on my life since she last saw me. Moving from Manila to London was a very big production. My aunt asked me a lot of questions about the move and how we transported all of our luggage on three boats and a plane to get them from the Philippines to the United Kingdom. The second boat was delayed by bad weather in the Suez Canal for our first two weeks in London. Until it caught up with us we had to wear all new clothing that we bought at English stores. I didn't think the story was very funny, but my Aunt Mabel kept laughing, so maybe it was.

In the afternoon, my friend Midge came over to visit, since she knew that I was due to arrive today. We took a walk over to my barn to see what had happened to it in the year since I was last here. I call it my barn, but it is technically my mother's barn. She kept it after my grandfather died, planning to build a home there after my father retired from the diplomatic service. In the meantime, I have the use of it when I come to visit Grover's Corner. It has been the headquarters of my animal research laboratory, my babysitting service, my think tank, and my rodeo. 

My barn looked about the same as it had the summer before. On the end facing the road was painted the legend 

REED AND GLASS  
THINK TANK

That was from the enterprise I had started the summer before. Midge and I, and my dog Agony, were the members of the think tank. We had solved a lot of problems, but it turned out that the think tank business wasn't very profitable. By the time I had to fly back to Manila, we had exactly broken even.

"Are you going to start the think tank back up?" Midge asked me as we looked up at the sign. "I've spoken to a couple of people who might be interested in hiring us, but I have't been able to get any commitments. Maybe when both human partners are present they'll be more impressed."

"No," I told her. "The Think Tank business didn't make us a lot of money and it was a lot of hard work. I was thinking of trying a field where the profit is more immediate, like advertising." 

"Advertising? Why is that better?" she asked. 

"Think about it. Every time we have started a business in the past, we have had to figure out how to let people know that we had started it. When we used the radio ad our babysitting business got a huge amount of new business from people who hadn't realized that they wanted to hire us. There must be tons of businesses like ours that have a lot of potential customers who don't know that they exist."

"Why would they need to hire us to advertise for them? Why can't they just take out a radio ad without us?"

I shook my head. Midge was smart and sensible, unlike most girls I knew, but she didn't know as much about advertising as I did. "Radio ads are expensive. We would have had to pay hundreds of dollars to place an ad, except that Mr. Adams was looking for ads to fill time on his new station and I traded him babysitting time for advertising time. Now that his radio station is more established, I doubt he would give us the same deal."

"If we're not offering radio ads, what kind of ads are we going to offer our customers? Math ads?" She grinned at her own pun. I had forgotten that in addition to Midge's many good qualities, she was afflicted with a love of puns. Personally, I cannot stand puns, and I reminded her of this fact. She told me that she did not need the reminder. She remembered very well that I was a stick in the mud who didn't laugh at funny jokes. I don't think this is true.

I confessed that I didn't know exactly what kinds of ads we would offer yet. "It will probably depend on the type of business that wants to advertise. If they have a big budget, we can create radio and magazine advertisements for them. If they don't have as much money, we will offer them cheaper ad campaigns." An advertising executive I sat next to on the flight from Manila to London told me that one of the most successful advertising techniques that costs very little is word of mouth advertising. If you get a recommendation for a product, you are more likely to buy that product, and it doesn't cost the advertising company anything. He told me that advertising agencies have all sorts of tricks to get people to recommend their products to their friends, like giving them free samples or sponsoring events that their customers attend. 

Midge rubbed her hands together eagerly. "I have an idea for a customer already."

"Who?" I asked.

"The Glass and Reed Advertising Agency. We will need to advertise ourselves to get our name out there and prove that we are effective at advertising. If we can't advertise ourselves, we hardly deserve to take money to advertise others."

I admitted that she had a good point. We spent most of the rest of the afternoon sitting in my barn discussing ideas for advertising, but most of them were too extravagant for our budget. Midge wanted us to hire the balloonist from last summer to fly around with a banner with our name on it, but she didn't know where we would get the money for that, since the last time we had hired him it had been with some of the entry money from our kite flying contest. When I pointed this out, she suggested that we build our own hot air balloon to fly around and advertise the company. I'm not really sure why she was fixated on balloons, but I told her she was welcome to research hot air balloons and figure out what we would have to do to make one. We parted a little bit frustrated with each other, but I wasn't worried that we would straighten things out. When you've been through as much together as Midge and I, a small fight was not going to get in the way of our friendship.

At dinner that night, I explained our argument to Uncle Al and Aunt Mabel. Uncle Al mostly kept asking more questions about Midge's hot air balloon plan and then laughing to himself. Aunt Mabel was more helpful. She suggested that I go over to pay a visit to her friend Mrs. Spector, who was a member of her garden club. Mrs. Spector's husband apparently had once managed a small local newspaper, but he'd been forced to stop putting out regular issues a couple years ago when he was hired by the Princeton Packet. Aunt Mabel thought he still had his printing press in his garage. Mrs. Spector was always complaining to my aunt that it was taking up a lot of space and he was never going to use it again, so my aunt thought he might lend it to us if we would move it out of the garage. I've never used a letterpress before, but I can't see it being very difficult, and it would be an excellent service to be able to offer our customers. I plan to go over and speak to Mrs. Spector tomorrow.

 

July 9th

Well, it turns out that the letterpress is more complicated than I had anticipated, but I will figure it out. I have to, since Midge has found us three customers already who want to hire us to advertise. If I can't get the letterpress working, we'll lose all of that business.

Mrs. Spector was exactly as eager to get rid of the press as Aunt Mabel said she would be. I had expected that she would have to call her husband to get permission, but she told me she would tell him after the fact that she had gotten rid of it. It was better to ask forgiveness than permission, she said, which seemed backwards to me, but Midge poked me in the chest when I was about to point this out. We had planned for Midge and I to load the press onto my tractor's cart and bring it back to the barn, but when Mrs. Spector took us out to the garage to show it to us, we realized that it was too heavy for the two of us to lift by ourselves. It was a big cast iron contraption with a lot of rollers, plus the trays of type. The trays of type we could lift if the two of us worked together, but the press itself was way too heavy. That was when Midge saved the day by suggesting that we offer one of our first customers a discount if they helped us move the printing press. Since without the press we had nothing, I agreed.

A couple of Midge's friends from school have decided to give our Babysitting Service idea from two summers ago a try. Midge warned them that babysitting was not the most relaxing of professions. Both of us have sworn that we will never babysit again after that summer. If it wasn't the kids driving you crazy, it was the parents. Despite her horror stories, though, Jamie and Erik still decided to fill the void we had left when we left the business. They had been operating since school let out three weeks earlier, but they had only gotten a small handful of short jobs in the neighborhood, and were looking to spread the word. 

Jamie was a tiny girl who looked like she was twelve or thirteen instead of fifteen, but Erik was heavy and the star slugger of the Babe Ruth League. Midge called him up and told him that if he would help us move the printing press, we would print their first advertisement for half price. He came right over and was a big help. I thought it was very clever of Midge to promise half price, when we hadn't even set our prices yet. Erik didn't know the value of the discount she promised him, but neither of us was going to point this out to him. 

With the extra muscle, the three of us were able to maneuver the printing press onto the cart. I drove the tractor most of the way, but I let Midge and Erik do a bit of the driving also, because they said it looked like fun. It was fun, actually. My uncle Al has a real full-sized tractor, even though he primarily uses it for mowing his lawn. When I am visiting for the summer, I mow the lawn for him, and in exchange I get to use the tractor for other things when it comes in handy. 

I spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how to set type and operate the press. Midge wasn't very helpful. She looked at the backwards type and proclaimed it defective. I think she was joking, but sometimes it is hard to tell with her. 

In spite of the backwards type, it only took me about half an hour to lay out our first advertisement. Unfortunately this made me overconfident. Nobody ever tells you, but setting type is the easiest part of the process. The hard part is the ink. You spread it out on a sort of pan, and then a roller sweeps over the pan and drags the ink over the plate. Or at least, in theory, that's how it works. It gets all over your hands as soon as you start to spread it out. I am a very careful and methodical person, but that ink acts like a living creature. I would keep my hands more than a foot away from the pan and then I'd glance down at my hands and find that somehow they were all black. I kept cleaning my hands on a towel and trying again. 

The other thing they don't tell you about running a letter press is that it is exhausting. The more advanced ones have an electric motor to run them, but this one only had a foot treadle to run it. At first, it doesn't seem too bad, but you keep your foot pumping for a while and your foot starts to want to fall off entirely. I wished we had kept Erik around to do the heavy lifting. Midge magnanimously agreed that I could be in charge of running the press, once she saw how much I was exerting myself. 

By the time we called it quits for dinner, I was starting to get the hang of it. Out of about thirty test prints, three were good enough to meet Midge's standards as acceptable to distribute, and only two of those were good enough for me. The rest had spots were the ink showed up too faintly. But I think that if we practice some more tomorrow, we should be able to get the hang of it. J&E Babysitting Service and our other customers are depending on it.

At dinner Aunt Mabel asked me if I'd given any thought to learning how to drive a car. I hadn't, because in London and Manila I didn't really need to drive anywhere, and I'd forgotten that you can get a driver's license in New Jersey when you turn sixteen. Uncle Al offered to teach me. We went out after dinner and practiced driving up and down the road for an hour. Driving is a lot of fun. It's not very different from driving the tractor, except that the car can go a lot faster so you have to pay more attention to when you brake. Uncle Al told me that I was already a lot better at driving than a lot of adults he knew, but he made that face he makes when he's kidding so I think his comment was more about the bad driving of the adults than about the way I drove. 

I think I'll practice with Uncle Al for a few more weeks before taking the license examination. Having my license could be a great boon for the advertising agency. It will make it a lot easier for us to distribute our leaflets once we've printed them if we don't have to do it by bicycle. 

 

July 11th

We've been so busy for the past couple of days that I haven't had time to write in my journal. We've gotten so many customers that we decided to print all of their advertisements in a single packet and distribute them all together. That will cut down on delivery time dramatically, saving our customers a lot of money.

I was right about there being a lot of people looking for inexpensive ways to advertise. I just hadn't anticipated exactly who needed to advertise, and for what. Fortunately Midge knows a lot more people in the area than I do, and she has been an excellent Sales Manager. She was pleased when I gave her the official title, I think because it left me as the Printing Manager and meant that she didn't have to spend any more time fiddling with type in the barn. It took her a lot of time to clean her hands after the first day, and since then she's been coming up with excuses not to work on the printing side of the business. If she keeps up the good work, I won't stop her. 

I've mostly sorted out the problems with bad prints. One of the ink rollers has a little divot in it. You wouldn't think much of it when you look at it, but it makes a big difference to how the ink spreads out. I tried hammering the roller even again, but it didn't do much. In the end, I took a little bit of plaster and spread it in the divot. When it hardened, I shaved it down until the roller was as even as I could make it. For the moment, it's holding, but I expect I'll have to replace the plaster every so often as it wears. I set ads for all three of our initial customers: J&E Babysitting Service, Lynnette's Tupperware, and Joey's Lawnmowing. I was just finishing the ad for Joey when Midge came into the barn with her notebook. 

"Hold the presses," she shouted. I jumped, since I hadn't noticed her coming in over the rattling of the press. Midge giggled. "I've always wanted to say that," she said. I looked at my hands and saw that I when I jumped, the ink had somehow managed to leap all over my hands again. I looked crossly at her as I cleaned my hands off with some rubbing alcohol. 

"Jamie told a bunch of her friends about our advertising service. They're all really competitive, and they're jealous of how professional Jamie and Erik seem with their advertisement, so now they're all coming up with things to advertise." She consulted her notebook. "Tina wants us to advertise that her cat is due to have kittens and she'll be selling the ones she's not keeping. Deirdre wants us to advertise that she's going to run the second annual kiteflying contest without us. Amy wants us to advertise that she's selling her younger brother. I wasn't going to accept it, but she offered me double our going rate, so I took the money. I figure if we put a disclaimer in that the sale isn't legally binding, we should be okay. Johanna wants us to advertise that she's playing a piano concert next week at Princeton University. Let's see. Dvorak's Piano Concerto in G Minor. Do you think you can do the funny accent marks in Dvorak? I bet we'll be fine if we leave them out. Everyone will know what we meant. And last, Rita wants us to advertise that she got a better score on the algebra final exam than Tina did. But Tina offered us double not to print it, so I gave Rita her money back." All told, at ten dollars for a half page advertisement, double the price for Amy's, half-price for Erik and Jamie, and twenty dollars from Tina, we're getting ninety five dollars for these advertisements, and distribution. I promised at least a hundred copies of our packet would be distributed. Does that sound reasonable?" 

Midge said all of this without waiting to hear my answers to any of her questions. It wasn't quite all in one breath, but it was close. She has quite a wind capacity. When I was a little hot tempered during our fight over the hot air balloon, I had told her that all she needed to do to fill up the balloon with hot air was to start talking, but I didn't think she would appreciate it if I repeated it again. I couldn't catch all of the details when she spoke that fast, but ninety five dollars for a couple of days work was better than I'd expected, and I could check her notes later to get the information I needed to print. So I nodded dumbly in answer to whichever of her questions she was asking me about at the moment. 

Since then, Midge has been out canvassing for more customers, and I've spent most of my waking hours running off prints. 

 

July 16th

Well, the first edition of the Glass and Reed Advertising Agency has been successfully delivered. It was a lot of hard work, and we are taking a couple of days off from working the press to recuperate, but then we will get back to work on a second edition because we now have a lot more people who want to hire us to advertise for them. 

I have gotten pretty good at setting type and running the press, finally, so Midge usually leaves me alone while I print our circulars. Sometimes she'll take Galileo out for a ride around the neighborhood. She sewed a special blanket for him that says Property of Glass and Reed Advertising Agency so that even when she's riding she can claim that she is working to drum up business. She is very proud that Galileo is a partner in the business the way Agony was in our first research business. Even though she has no interest at all in working the printing press, she doesn't want to work any less than I do. I'm actually glad that she has stopped trying to help me with the press. I can run the press much faster alone, and I waste a lot less paper. And I can make Midge deal with all of our customers. Some of them can be pretty demanding.

When I had finished printing all of our circulars, we split them up between the two of us and put them in the baskets of our bicycles. Mr. Glass had an old driver's map of the area that he said we could write on. We drew up delivery routes for each of us to maximize the number of houses each of us could hit. Midge was more clever at this part than I was. She came up with routes that brought us back to Grover's Corner right when we would have been running out of circulars to deliver, if everything had gone according to plan.

For the first fifty houses, everything was going according to plan. I rode up to each house and dropped the circular on the porch, or handed it to the owner if they were about in the yard. Midge's route made the whole trip easy to follow, so I never had to ride very far between houses. The people I handed the circulars to were usually a little crabby about it at first. One man who was working in his garden told me that he was inundated with ads for things he was never going to buy, from stores that were too far away for him to go to even if he did want to buy their deals. "Why does a store all the way up in Rockaway want me to know that they have a great deal on rowboat oars?" he asked me. I told him that all of our advertisements were for local businesses and services and he promised me that he would take a look when his hands weren't covered with dirt. 

After that, I made the local nature of our circular a major part of the pitch when I delivered it, and people seemed to be more interested. A couple of them even took down my address and phone number so that we could do an advertisement for them. You would be surprised how many people have interests that they are willing to pay to tell other people about, if the price isn't too expensive. Our next issue may have advertisements for a Chess Club, a charity golf tournament, a lost cat, and a freelance accountant, if everyone I spoke to gives me a call. 

After the fifty house mark, I continued to follow Midge's route as it started to bring me back toward Grover's Corner. I had gone another block or so when I started to hear a dog barking, getting louder and louder. I was standing on the porch of a farmhouse, having just handed a circular to the farmer's wife, who was asking if they could advertise their farmer's market in our next edition, when I discovered the origin of the barking. Agony, my beagle, had somehow managed to track me down. He is a very smart dog, and a good tracker, and I guess he could tell that I had started to head back toward him and wanted to greet my return. 

I shouted to Agony to calm down, but something had gotten him worked up. He was running all over the place, back and forth across the road, chasing something. Agony is not the calmest dog in the world, but he usually has a reason for getting excited, like a rabbit he is chasing or a smell that is bothering him. Dogs have much more sensitive noses than humans do, so Agony will often start acting up well before I notice whatever it is that's caught his attention. 

Agony disappeared into the farmer's cornfield in search of whatever it was he was chasing. Agony is a good dog, but when he's on the hunt he can cause a lot of damage, so I apologized to the farmer's wife and told him that I would go get my dog out of her field. I didn't want him to ruin the crop of a potential customer, even though she was very understanding, being the owner of a very fine sheepdog herself. 

By the time I had run over to the edge of the cornfield to see where Agony had gone, however, he had bounded out of the field already, preceded by a very fat groundhog. It was clearly a very wily groundhog, since Agony was much faster than it, but he hadn't caught the groundhog yet. I decided to let Agony keep chasing, since most farmers don't like groundhogs very much, and Mrs. Kleinfelter would probably be pleased if Agony drove away the animal for good. I turned my back for a minute to shout to Mrs. Kleinfelter, which was my biggest mistake. As soon as I turned my back, the groundhog made a beeline straight for my bicycle and managed to knock it off its kickstand and onto the ground. 

When I heard the crash, I turned my head back and I could see the advertising circulars that had been in my bicycle's basket were starting to blow away. I thought about how much time it would take to reprint them with dismay. I ran over to start collecting them. Agony saw me and decided that gathering up circulars would be a more fun game than chasing the groundhog, so he started running after them as they blew up and around in the wind, barking happily. Fortunately for the circulars, he was little more successful at this chase than he was at catching the groundhog. When I had gathered up all of the circulars that I was going to be able to, Agony turned up placidly at my feet with a bundle of about five circulars in his mouth. He looked very pleased with himself, and wouldn't surrender any of the papers no matter how much I tried to coax. He just wagged his tail and kept his teeth locked on a corner of the pages. 

Just when I was about to give up and let Agony keep his prize, Mrs. Kleinfelter came to save the day. She had a handbaked dog biscuit in her hand. It was one of the treats she had made for her sheepdog, but she offered it to Agony in exchange for the papers. Agony eyed her warily, alert to the possibility of a trick, but after she wafted the biscuit under his nose, he could not resist any further. He let go of the papers and wolfed down the biscuit in one bite, then started licking the crumbs off of Mrs. Kleinfelter's hand. The papers went flying in all directions, but I was able to grab all but one of them before they blew down the road. 

I righted my bicycle and put all of the circulars I'd retrieved back into the basket. A satisfied Agony sat next to my bicycle, looking innocent of all crimes. A handful of our ads were lost completely, and six of them had a full set of dog teeth punctures, but the remaining thirty were in good shape. I completed the rest of my run without event, with Agony following me all the way home.

Midge greeted me when I returned to the barn. She had beaten me back by about a half hour, and she said she had delivered all of her circulars, but she hadn't recruited as many new customers as I did, so I can hold my head high. The next time I go on a delivery run, however, Midge can take Agony with her and see how she does. 

 

July 23rd

Tomorrow we will release the second edition of the Glass and Reed Advertising Agency's local advertising circular. It features advertisements from most of our original customers, who were largely very happy with the first edition, as well as fifteen new customers. If our growth keeps up, I'm going to have to hire an assistant typesetter to help run off all of the ads, or else by the time it comes for delivery I will be too worn out to stay standing on my bicycle. 

We did have a few controversies to resolve before going to print, but I mostly left Midge to handle them, since they tended to involve her friends. Apparently neither side of the math exam argument was happy with a resolution where they would have to outbid each other every single time we put out an advertising circular, and I wasn't too thrilled about the prospect of blackmailing our customers, so we decided to adopt a company policy of refusing to produce any advertisements if any people mentioned in the ad objected, with no charge. Tina was happier than Rita about the outcome, but both were at least happy that their allowances were safe for the time being. 

Our other change in policy was for long term advertising contracts. These deals are very common at other advertising agencies. If a customer wants to pay upfront for advertising for a whole year, the agency gives them a discount. I wasn't sure about us offering long term contracts, since it takes me the same amount of work to set an advertisement for a new customer as it does to set an advertisement for a return customer, but Midge said it would be good for business. 

"We get the money in advance, so they can't change their mind later in the summer and go elsewhere. It's guaranteed money for weeks when we don't have a lot of other business. And it'll make us look more professional, since real ad agencies do it," she pointed out. "Jamie and Erik will pay us fifteen dollars to advertise their babysitting service for the rest of the summer, since the first ad was so successful. If our own experience is any indicator, they'll get flooded with work and won't need any more advertising by the middle of August, so I think we should take their money now before they change their mind."

"Fine," I said, "But I think we should put that money away and only take the profits when we actually print the ads. If for some reason we can't print enough editions to fulfill our contract, our customers are going to want to get some of their money back."

"I can't imagine that happening," Midge said. "You've got the printing process down perfectly and I've perfected our delivery process. We should be able to get out a circular every week for the rest of the summer. But okay, we can do it your way." 

Tomorrow night I think we will both make an early night, since we will be worn out from the delivery. Then the night after I'll be hosting the whole neighborhood for a barbecue, because the Kleinfelters paid for their two page advertisement with a side of beef. Aunt Mabel and Uncle Al don't have enough space in their freezer to store all of that meat, so Midge and I decided to cook it all in one go and feed the neighborhood. Aunt Mabel said it was a very good idea. We've caused enough trouble for our neighbors over the years that she thinks it's time we paid it back a little bit. I can see why she would say that, since things tend to get exciting when I'm around, but I don't think it's fair that she said that we caused the trouble. The excitement is almost never our fault. But grownups never seem to believe us when we say that.

 

July 26th

I don't know how to explain the past several days. So much has happened, and I feel like our lives may never be the same again. I feel it is very important that my journal record everything that has happened in Grover's Corner, so that future generations will know what contact was like.

Our delivery went fairly smoothly. We knew the route, so we were able to go faster. Agony decided not to cause any trouble for me this time. We got home, counted our money, and biked over to the diner for celebratory hamburgers and milkshakes. The next morning, I woke up early to take delivery of the beef from the Kleinfelters and carry it back to Uncle Al's backyard. Midge and I shared in the job of making the side dishes, and I was in charge of the meat. The butchery work took most of the day, but it was worth it. The grilled steaks I made were delicious and everyone in Grover's Corner ate themselves sick, even the Apples, who seemed to have warmed to me since last summer. Everything was normal, in a way that no longer makes sense to me. How could we have been so unaware of what was to follow? How could we have taken for granted the pleasure of a well-grilled steak?

A bunch of us sat around the fire telling ghost stories after we finished eating. Midge's friend Trish had told just a good one about a demonic horse with no rider when Belinda Osborn shouted for everyone to look up at the sky. Little Belinda still hasn't gotten over her hobby of playing pranks on all of the grownups and older kids who don't know her, so nobody paid her much mind until somebody else looked up and told us that Belinda wasn't kidding, there really were a bunch of bright blue lights in the sky. 

I was about to look up when I remembered a book I had just finished reading the other day, John Wyndham's _The Day of the Triffids_. In the opening chapter of that book, everyone had looked at the unexpected bright lights in the sky and the next morning they had woken up blind. The hero of the novel was the only man who didn't look at the lights in the sky and therefore didn't become blind. I tried to avoid looking at the sky, but after a couple of minutes of hearing everyone's excited exclamations, I couldn't resist taking a peek. 

Well, I'm still not blind, which is lucky, I guess, but we all could have been a lot luckier. The blue lights lingered in the sky for about fifteen minutes or so. It's hard to describe what it looked like. The lights twinkled like stars, but they were a lot bigger, and as we watched they grew bigger and bigger, until most of the sky was filled with an eerie blue light. As the lights grew in size, it brightened until when they were at their peak it was as bright as daylight, only tinted a peculiar shade of blue, even though it was almost nine PM. It was unlike anything I'd ever seen before, an immense opalescence that had us all alternating between excitement, confusion, and an inexplicable antsiness. 

Uncle Al had gone into the kitchen when we saw the lights. He came back out with a battery operated transistor radio cranked to full volume. An announcer was delivering a newsbreak in a crisp monotone voice.

"... Professor Pierson of the Observatory at Princeton confirms Farrell's observation, and describes the phenomenon as (quote) like a jet of blue flame shot from a gun (unquote). We now return you to the music of Ramón Raquello, playing for you in the Meridian Room of the Park Plaza Hotel, situated in downtown New York."

Then a piece of dance music started playing and Uncle Al turned down the volume to summarize what he had heard before. "They don't know what it is, but they say it originated in an atmospheric disturbance on Mars. I'm going to keep this radio out here so we can hear if there are any updates."

"I know Professor Pierson," said Professor Gore, who was a professor of engineering at the university, and one of the people who had been with us the day we discovered oil in Grover's Corner. "If you'll let me borrow your phone, Al, I can ring him up and see if I can get some more details out of him."

My uncle let him into the house. I stood next to Midge and asked her what she thought it was. Midge is much more practical than I am, and also she doesn't read science fiction the way I do. She said that if Professor Pierson said it was an atmospheric disturbance on Mars, that was probably what it was. I, on the other hand, was worrying more and more that I had lapsed by looking at the lights. I was certain that we would all wake up blind in the morning, but I decided not to tell Midge, since I knew she would make fun of me if I told her. 

Professor Gore came back out a couple of minutes later, shrugging. "The phone just rang and rang. I guess he's busy watching the sky right now." Almost immediately after he said that, though, we found that was not the reason he was unavailable. They interrupted the music on the radio again to bring an interview with Professor Pierson. Uncle Al turned the volume back up and we all crowded around the radio to listen. 

Professor Pierson explained that he believed the lights were simply a result of the atmospheric conditions on Mars. The reporter asked if they were any threat to Earth, but the Professor said that since Earth and Mars were separated by forty million miles, there was no chance for anything from Mars to reach us on Earth. It was at that moment that all of our attentions were taken away from the radio by a loud roar from above our heads. It sound like an airplane was buzzing by us from way too low, or like sitting in the cabin of a hot air balloon. We all looked up and saw that the blue lights had faded away, but a bright burst of flame was flying across the sky, descending straight toward us. 

Everyone started screaming and running around and trying to find somewhere to take cover. By the time we'd started to run toward the basement, it was over, with a loud crash from the direction of Mr. Baines's farm. Mr. Baines had been at the barbecue, so he of course started running toward his field to see what it was, and pretty much everyone who was there started following him. 

"Henry!" my uncle shouted over the din, and I turned to listen. "I don't think you should go over there. We don't know what it might be, but it could be dangerous. I feel a responsibility to your mother and father to make sure I keep you safe." I considered protesting, but Uncle Al is a sensible man and he usually trusts me to take care of myself, so if he thought it was worth being extra careful this time, I would listen to him. I called over to Midge to hang back with us, but she followed her parents into Mr. Baines's field. 

We climbed up to the top floor of the house, which had a view of the field out one of the rear windows. A crowd was starting to gather around something, but we couldn't see anything clearly except for a plume of smoke in the center of the crowd. The crowd grew, and it was clear that it was more than just the people from our party. Cars were starting to pull up at the edge of the field and people were pouring out in ever greater numbers, full of people who were curious about what was going on in the field.

In my room I had a pair of binoculars my mother had given me for my birthday last year so I could go birdwatching. I ran over and pulled them out of their case so I could get a better look at the scene. The binoculars are really sharp. Even though the plume of smoke and the crowd was several thousand feet away and it was pretty dark out, I could make out people's faces in the moonlight. I waved at Midge, even though she couldn't see me. She was jumping up and down anxiously, trying to see over the taller people in front of her. 

One of the newcomers was holding a microphone, and what looked like some sort of antenna, and I guessed he was the radio reporter who had been interviewing Professor Pierson. He was standing next to a thin man in a tweed suit who was holding a notebook. They were gesturing toward the smoke, so I turned my binoculars over to see what was there. 

Somebody had driven his truck onto the farm and pointed his headlights directly at it, so I could see that it was a vast hole in the middle of the field. In the middle of the hole, half-buried, was an enormous metal cylinder. It scattered the light from the headlights out into the crowd. Mostly, people were standing back from the cylinder, but a couple of idiots were edging in, like they were working up the courage to touch the damned thing.

"What do you see there, Henry?" my aunt asked. She was watching out the window, same as me, but she didn't have my binoculars so it all just looked like a mass of people to her.

"There's some sort of giant cylinder that's landed in Mr. Baines's field," I told her. "It's still hot from the crash landing. Smoke is rolling off of it. But some fools are trying to go up and touch it, and the police are trying to keep them away. Oh, hey, there's Officer Haywood, Midge's friend. He's dragging away someone who tried to make a run for the cylinder. And that radio reporter and the Princeton astronomy professor are walking toward it now. And... Oh, hey, the top of the cylinder is spinning, slowly, like the top of a bottle being unscrewed. Boy, what do you think it is? Could it be actual aliens making first contact in Grover's Corner?"

Uncle Al looked at me strangely. "Any other time of the year, I would have said that surely aliens could have found any other place on Earth to be a more suitable landing ground. But these summers..." he trailed off thoughtfully. 

"I didn't make aliens land here," I told him.

"I know you didn't. Still, I can guarantee that if you weren't here, it wouldn't have happened." 

The top of the cylinder continued to spin until it was clear of the cylinder. It fell off and tumbled to the ground, nearly hitting the idiots who were standing too close. I checked on Midge and saw that the Glasses were all standing well back. Midge was still trying to see above everyone. She was jumping more and more furiously, but it wasn't helping much. From my vantage point at our back window I probably had a better view of the whole scene. I darted my binoculars back to the cylinder, where I could see something start to crawl out. It was dark-colored, probably black, with ridged patterns across the slimy reptilian tentacles that were pulling it out of the cylinder inch by inch. Suddenly, the creature popped straight up out of the canister like it was on rockets. 

I could see that it was perched on some sort of metal scaffolding that looked almost like an easel, or a photographer's tripod. It landed on the edge of the pit and started walking like a three-legged insect on the articulated legs of the tripod. Then a mirror-like appendage extended from the base it was perching on. It aimed at one of the gatherings of police officers who were constructed a barrier to keep the public away and a flame flew straight toward them. We could hear the screams of the officers from where we stood, and everyone in the crowd turned and started running, pell-mell, as fast as they could in the chaos. 

The flames continued as first a second and then a third creature came out of the cylinder on tripods and began assaulting the crowd. I tried to find Midge in the crowd, but in all the chaos I couldn't track her down.

"I can't find Midge. I have to go make sure she's safe," I told Uncle Al and Aunt Mabel, putting down my binoculars. They tried to stop me, but I ran past them. I don't remember leaping down the stairs, but I must have been taking them three or four at a time, because before I knew it I was at the back door of the house and running out into the yard. I'm lucky I didn't break my leg then.

"Midge!" I shouted, but it was so loud, with people telling and sirens blaring and fires ripping through Mr. Baines's field. I knew there was no chance that she could hear me. I could barely hear my own shouts, but I kept shouting, desperately, hoping that somehow she could hear me. I waded into the scrum of people fleeing the field into our backyard and any other escape route they could find, looking for her, but all I saw was unfamiliar, terrified faces. I broke through the crowd after some time until the only thing between me and the tripods was a bloody field. There were burned bodies strewn everywhere. Acrid smoke rose into the sky, cutting my visibility down to a few dozen feet in most directions. I saw Deirdre's body lying face up in the grass. Her scorched left leg was several feet away. Just a few days earlier she had sat in my barn, chewing gum and telling me about her plans to make this year's kite contest better than last years. The tripods marched onward, shooting gouts of flame at anyone who bumbled close enough. The smoky air hit my throat and I coughed involuntarily.

I could see Professor Gore dragging a body away from the pit and I started to run to help him when a hand grabbed my arm firmly. I turned and saw that it was Mr. Glass. He was bleeding from his forehead and his eyes looked glassy and dazed. At first I couldn't hear what he was saying, so he repeated it, practically shouting it in my ears. 

It sounded like he was saying every word as a full sentence. "We. Have. Midge." He gasped for air. I tried to steady him by putting my hand on his arm, but he kept wheezing. "Your. Uncle. Started. The Car. Hurry. Up. We're. Getting. Away." 

We started to run back toward the house, but Mr. Glass was limping so we couldn't move that fast. I ran around to his other side and put my arm over his shoulder so that he could take his weight off the bad leg. This allowed us to move a little faster, but we were still precarious in navigating around any obstacles. I could hear the screams all around me. They were the screams of my friends and neighbors, who had made Grover's Corner such a special place for me over the past four summers. I wanted to help them, but I didn't know what I could do.

When we reached the car, I helped Mr. Glass into the seat next to Midge. Then I got up again. I was about to run back to see who else I could get away from the tripods when Uncle Al placed himself between the me and the field. He looked weary and scared, like I've never seen him look before. 

"I know what you're thinking, Henry, but we can't. The army is coming. They said on the radio. There will be bombs and missiles and machine guns. We can't stick around or we'll all be dead."

I didn't know what to say to my uncle. Part of me wanted to stick around and fight, like the seafaring Harrises of my ancestry no doubt would have. My air rifle's bullets would have bounced off the armored tripods like peanuts flicked against a tank. Mr. Baines's field was a burning wasteland and I could see that Mr. Glass needed to be moved somewhere safe where he could get proper medical attention. Finally, I nodded and got into the back seat of the car next to Midge. 

Uncle Al drove, and my Aunt Mabel sat next to him. I was so dazed by what I had seen that it took me a couple of minutes to realize that Midge's mother wasn't in the car with us. As we drove, we listened in silence to the radio. Nobody knew what to say, and it was comforting to listen to the radio broadcaster who seemed capable of endless speech.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I have just been handed a message that came in from Grover's Corner by telephone. Just a moment. At least forty people, including six state troopers lie dead in a field east of the village of Grover's Corner, their bodies burned and distorted beyond all possible recognition. The next voice you hear will be that of Brigadier General Montgomery Smith, commander of the state militia at Trenton, New Jersey."

The General's voice was commanding and therefore reassuring. It let us pretend, for a moment, that somebody knew what was happening and had a plan for what to do. "I have been requested by the governor of New Jersey to place the counties of Mercer and Middlesex as far west as Princeton, and east to Jamesburg, under martial law. No one will be permitted to enter this area except by special pass issued by state or military authorities. Four companies of state militia are proceeding from Trenton to Grover's Corner, and will aid in the evacuation of homes within the range of military operations. Thank you."

My aunt cleared her throat. "Well, I guess we have a plan now," she said. "Keep driving south toward Trenton and look for the militiamen to tell us where to evacuate to."

"No!" Midge shouted, the first words I had heard from her since getting into the car. My uncle slowed the car down, startled, though in truth traffic on Brunswick Pike wasn't moving very fast. It seemed like tens of thousands of cars were filling the highway, jockeying with each other for position. 

"If we run away, we're letting the monsters win," she said, and I saw that tears were streaming down her face. "We have to fight back. We have to hold on, not let them take our homes away from us."

Mr. Glass put an arm around her shoulder. "What can we do, darling? Those heat rays... our cars won't shield against them. The army is coming in with armored tanks and bomber planes. They're our best hope of fighting back. We have to trust in the army to defend us, the way they have in the past. All we can do is make sure we stay alive and out of harm's way. Your mother wouldn't want us to do anything stupid."

I could see that Midge was unmoved, but their argument was cut short as the forested land on the east side of Brunswick Pike caught on fire. The tripods couldn't be far behind.

My aunt pointed at the woods. "Look at that, Al." 

"I see," he grunted. He took his hands off the wheel. "I don't think we're going to be able to outrun them on the highway. Anybody have any suggestions?" 

Everyone got quiet as the blaze on our left hand side grew closer and closer to the highway. The cars ahead of us were, if anything, moving slower.

Suddenly, Midge broke the silence. "Wait, what's that road ahead of us? Alexander Road? If we take that and double back, we can hole up in the cave Henry and I found when we were exploring the Millstone River." I remembered the cave, which we had discovered when I was hunting for fossils a year or two earlier. It wasn't very large or deep, and there hadn't been any fossils in sight, so I had nearly forgotten about it. I guessed Midge thought about it more than I did, since she had wanted to establish a secret clubhouse there. 

"Midge is right. The entrance is pretty well hidden. The opening is narrow to climb into, but if everyone can squeeze in, there's room enough for all of us," I said. "It should be safe enough for now, and I think there are a couple of nearby fruit trees and we can catch fish in the river if we end up spending a lot of time there."

We've been hiding in the cave since then. There's plenty of room for the five of us, and there's even a sort of ventilated chimney hole in the rock, so we can light a cooking fire without having to go outside and announce ourself to the world. We've been living off of mushrooms and berries and a couple of river trout I managed to catch with Uncle Al. 

The news from the wider world is pretty bleak. The radio broadcasts stopped sometime yesterday, but before that it sounded like things were not going well for the Army. The landing in Mr. Baines's field was just the first of many landings, and the tripods are already assaulting New York and Washington and many other major cities. There is nobody on Earth who is capable of fighting back against these Martian conquerors. We're stuck here in this cave for who knows how long. 

We don't have any access to a telephone, so I haven't been able to hear anything from my parents in London, but I can't say anything about that to anyone because at least I can still choose to believe that my mother and father are fine. My parents have travelled all over the world, in tough jungle conditions and icy mountainous regions, so I believe they'll be able to find a safe place to hide. 

I helped Mr. Glass and Midge carve a memorial on a big smooth stone we rescued from the river. It reads

Hazel Glass

Loving Wife and Devoted Mother

It's the best we were able to do under the circumstances, but it doesn't feel like anywhere near enough.

 

July 28th

Things are very dire here. We are very lucky that I've read so many books about surviving in the wilderness. Without my knowledge of the local plants and animals, I don't think we would have made it past the first night. I've had to stop my Uncle Al from eating several poisonous mushrooms that he insisted were just like the ones he ate growing up. My respect for my mother grows, when I think that she must have spent her whole childhood protecting my uncle from similar mistakes. 

All day and all night, we can hear the roar of warplanes flying by overhead on their mysterious missions. Aunt Mabel says that we should take it as a positive sign that the good ol' United States hasn't given up yet. I would like to believe her, but it's been four days since the Martians landed in Grover's Corner and we've seen no evidence of that army actually on the ground since the tanks that rolled past on the first day. They were powerless to stop the Martian tripods, and there haven't been any more tanks to follow, that we've heard. There haven't been ambulances wailing through the streets, carrying people to Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital or Princeton University Medical Center. There haven't been firetrucks careening from fire to fire putting out the blazes started by the enemy's heat rays, which have populated our skies with a dark, acrid cloud of smoke that hasn't lifted still. There haven't even been cars driving down the street searching for any sign of lost loved ones. Perhaps they are just as scared as we are to venture out of their safe hiding spots. Our apparently safe hiding spots, I mean. If the Martians- or god forbid, our own desperate government- pull nuclear weapons out of their arsenal, our shallow riverside cave will offer little protection.

Mr. Glass is doing a little better, but he needs better medical treatment than he can get from us. We cleaned his wounds to the best of our ability, and bound them with cloth ripped from my slacks, but I am still worried about an infection. He definitely has a couple of cracked ribs and I think he has suffered a concussion, from the way he reacts to the light whenever he peeks out of the cave. We're trying to force him to keep from moving very much, but we are all very restless after days cooped up in the cave, and it is very hard for him even though he knows that he is risking aggravating his injuries. His skin is still very pale.

Midge has barely left his side. She is very much not herself. I keep trying to get her involved with my chores by giving her little tasks to do, but when I check up on her a half hour later I'll find that she's gathered up only two sticks, neither of which would make good firewood, and then returned to check on her father's condition. There's not much any of us can do for him until the roads are safe to travel again, but I know better than to say that directly to her. I'm really worried about her. I'm so used to relying on Midge to be there at my side, ready to support me whenever I'm in trouble. It is difficult to have Midge right here, but not really here. 

Aunt Mabel has been much more helpful. She's come up with all sorts of recipes for preparing the berries we've dared to forage, and she has a wonderful touch for replacing Mr. Glass's bandages without jostling him or otherwise putting him in pain. Unfortunately our food supplies are running low, since we've depleted the bushes in the immediate vicinity of the cave and none of us is willing to venture out very far. If this goes on for much longer, we're going to have to, risks be damned. Mr. Glass is in no condition to skip a meal, even such as our meals have been. 

And what if the assault goes on for weeks, or months? What if those warplanes go silent and we know at last that we are alone? What if all that is left of Grover's Corner is a handful of weary, half-starved cave dwellers with nothing to defend themselves but a handful of pointy sticks? At what point do I and my friends and family have an obligation to fight back, in whatever way we can, to prove that man did not go down without a fight?

 

July 31st

We had just reached the point where I had convinced Midge and Uncle Al to go along with my hot air balloon idea when everything changed. I'm pretty glad things didn't get that far. Even though I talked a good game, I didn't really think the thing would work.

The genesis of the idea came when I was telling Midge stories she already knew. She was just staring listlessly into space one night as we sat around the fire, so I started telling her the story of the time we started a babysitting service. I didn't get much of a response from her, but she didn't tell me to stop and the adults were all laughing at our mishaps, so when I finished all the good stories from that summer, I moved on to the tale of the rodeo. And after that, I told the story of our think tank. Our think tank's problem solving culminated in the kite flying contest that was judged from the basket of a hot air balloon. My Uncle Al was roaring from the details of the story that he hadn't heard before. I decided there wasn't much point in hiding the truth from him, when I didn't know how much longer we had. 

The hot air balloon story cheered Midge up more than anything else I've done for her over the past week. She corrected me when I got a detail wrong and added in a story about a meeting with Rodney that I hadn't been at. That night, as I slept I dreamed about sitting in the basket of a hot air balloon floating over the destruction and devastation left by the Martians. I woke up with a new purpose.

Everyone else was more skeptical when I explained my plan. 

"We don't have any of the things you need to make a hot air balloon," my uncle protested.

"True, but we can make them from the things we have available. There are plenty of reeds in the river to weave a basket from. The beach blanket you and Aunt Mabel have been sleeping on would make an excellent canopy with a little retailoring. We have good, sturdy rope to bind everything together. And if we siphon some of the gasoline out of the car, we can fuel the balloon for quite a while. And we have as many ballasting stones as we could ever want, right here. They're the perfect size."

"Even if we did build it, what would we do?" Aunt Mabel asked.

"I don't know, but the Martians still don't seem to have established air supremacy, since we're still flying warplanes overhead. We could float up in our balloon and survey the ground below. If we find a spot where we can see no sign of fire or tripods, we can land and try to make our way to safety. Mr. Glass is getting better, but he needs surgery. He needs antibiotics. He needs someone who can actually tend to his wounds. We have a better shot at covering long distances and making it away from here if we can take to the air," I said. And we needed a project to give us hope, or we'd just continue getting crabbier and crabbier toward each other as the time in close quarters continued. 

Nobody wanted to help me at first, but I got to work harvesting reeds anyway. They were easy to find, and they weren't too hard to pluck out of the riverbed, so pretty soon I was hauling small bundles of them back to the cave to dry them out, careful not to spend too much time outside and carefully listening for any sound of danger. Eventually I persuaded Aunt Mabel to help me weave. I don't think she believed in the balloon project, but she wanted something to keep herself busy and creating a basket big enough to fit all of us certainly was a labor intensive project. At first, we did the weaving inside the cave, but after six hours it had grown large enough that it was unwieldy to work inside, so we decided to risk the cave mouth. 

I guess seeing the progress we made convinced Midge that the balloon project might actually have a chance of working, because she eagerly helped us move the partial basket out to the cave mouth, and she actually started making trips to the riverbed with me to gather more reeds. She was more like the old Midge, too, making fun of me if I tripped and fell in the river and offering suggestions on how to make the work go faster. With extra hands on the project, we started making real progress. We finished the main body of the basket and stood back to examine our work. It collapsed in a heap before our eyes.

Chagrined, Midge and I examined our work. 

"We need more internal support," I diagnosed.

'Great observation," she groused back at me. "You have a great career as a structural engineer ahead of you."

I ignored her and continuing looking at what was left of a full day's work. "I think we can save it," I said. "We'll have to reweave a lot of it, though, much tighter."

Then we heard a sound we hadn't heard all week, the sound of a car driving. We were obscured from the road by a patch of trees, so Midge and I ran out to see who it was. We saw a big white Cadillac roaring down the road and we waved it down. I can barely imagine the sight we were: Large patches of my clothing had been cut away to serve as bandaging for Mr. Glass, and both of our bodies were caked with sun dried river mud. We both wore makeshift turbans to keep the sun out of our eyes. The gentleman behind the wheel probably would have taken us for savages, except that his outfit was equally unusual. It may have started as a professorial tweed suit, for we quickly learned that this was the Professor Pierson of the radio broadcasts, but the suit was covered in dried blood and torn practically to shreds.

We introduced ourselves as friends of Professor Gore as soon as we realized who he was, and Professor Pierson sadly told us that he had seen Professor Gore's burned body out on the field. He followed us back to the cave mouth when we told him there were more of us, since he said that he only wanted to give us his news once. 

Professor Pierson had spent the past two days trekking up to New York on foot, careful to avoid encountering any of the Martians. He'd met a few people, but not many, and everyone he met was doing the same thing we were doing: hiding and doing whatever it took to ensure our own survival. The professor believed that he had an obligation to take a wider perspective, and he was sure that since the Martians that had landed in Grover's Corner and elsewhere around the state had all been converging in New York, that was the place to look for answers. What he had found there had shocked him: The Martians he discovered were all dead, intact inside their metallic shells. 

He doesn't know why it happened, but he found a CB radio and got in touch with whatever military authority is left, and they confirmed that the reconnaissance planes they've been sending out have been reporting that the Martians have stopped wherever they were. We don't know why it's happened: perhaps the atmosphere on Earth was not suitable for them, or perhaps the Earth's magnetic field disoriented them. Or perhaps, as my Uncle Al insists, they grew afraid that my hot air balloon would defeat them and they died of fear. I don't know. It's hard to imagine that creatures mighty enough to defeat the most powerful war machines at the disposal of the world's armies just keeling over like that. 

We invited Professor Pierson to stop over with us for dinner. He's the first new face we've seen in more than a week, the only person who isn't tired of every conversation topic that any of us could think of. I caught a couple of trout, wrapped them in some leaves, and we roasted them over a bonfire on the riverbank. The fire blazed in the open, for the first time since the Glass and Reed Advertising Agency barbecue. 

We talked about many things as we ate. We shared our survival stories with the professor, and he shared his with us. He admired the basket of our prospective balloon, which he admitted might possibly have been able to fly someday. And then we started talking about the people we would never see again, and we told their stories, so that nobody would ever forget. We talked all night along the river bank, and as the first lights of dawn licked their way through the trees, we spoke of the hard work of rebuilding. We have a lot of work to put Grover's Corner and America and the whole world back together. We've lost a lot, but if five people can come together in a cave to build a hot air balloon, the survivors of this disaster can rebuild the world.


	2. A Photo Tour of Grover's Corner

I don't know how many conversations I have had with people when I told them that the Henry Reed books are set in Grover's Corner and I then had to explain, "No, the War of the Worlds broadcast was set in Grover's Mill, which is a real place in New Jersey. Our Town takes place in Grover's Corners, which is a fictional place in New Hampshire. Henry Reed takes place in Grover's Corner, no S, which is a fictional place in New Jersey that is veeeeeeeeery, veeeeeeeeery loosely based on Grover's Mill in the 1950s and 1960s." But it has been a lot of identical conversations.

One of the things I have always loved about both Henry Reed and the War of the Worlds broadcast is the way they impose a fictional alter-geography over the real geography of the greater Princeton area, a real geography that I grew up with. They mention real places, real places I have been to or driven past dozens of times, and they set them beside places that I know perfectly well don't exist, and it is delightful to me.

This is a photo-tour of some of the real places from Henry Reed and the War of the Worlds broadcast that I conducted over the past few weeks. Even though decades have passed, some of the sites have remained pretty much the same. If you are selective in the way you process the world, you can almost pretend you are driving through Henry Reed's Grover's Corner, unaware that is about to be assaulted by the Martians.

**Welcome to Grover's Mill.**

  
It's not so much a town as it is a postage stamp. In Henry Reed, Grover's Corner has about ten houses. Grover's Mill has a suburban subdevelopment now, but I suspect that back when Robertson was writing, it had about as many houses as Grover's Corner, and the rest was farmland.  
  
Here's some of the geese that Henry and Midge's think tank figured out how to drive away... but clearly they came back.  
  
This building was once a supply barn for the actual mill in Grover's Mill. Then it was a general store. Now it's an office building.  
  
When Henry and Midge rode Galileo, they needed this sign for protection.  
  
When Henry and Midge rode bikes, they needed this sign for protection.  
  
Okay, enough for Henry Reed, time for the other part of the tour.  
  
The Princeton Observatory where Professor Pierson sighted the Martians.  
  
A good landing site for Martian craft?  
  
An old water tower that according to local legend, was mistaken for a Martian tripod and shot by panicked citizens.  
  
Hope you enjoyed the tour!  
  



End file.
